Dear Clementine: Issue #4

Patriarchy is the violence that dare not speak its name

📝 Before We Begin

Hello lovers! Welcome back to another edition of Dear Clementine, and a special welcome to the new subscribers joining us this week! I’m very thankful for your support, and I’m looking forward to getting to know you all through the comments here and in our subscriber only chat threads. In fact, as part of the revamp for DC, I’ve added a few special topic chat threads for you to check out! These include:

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I’ve got huge things slated to share with you over the coming month. I’m currently writing a long form piece on the intersection between the manosphere and conservative YouTube channels, and the reliance of both on rhetorical devices designed to shut down opponents rather than engage in meaningful discussions. I’ll be sharing that with you once it’s finished (which hopefully isn’t too far away). More importantly, I’ll be posting it in my brand new substack, Write To Revolt.

I’ll be publishing this under the DC banner, which means subscribers here will have it delivered direct to their inbox without having to sign up to anything new. Write To Revolt is a place for long form writing on radical ideas, resistance and revolution. Content will initially be written by me (a notoriously revolting woman), but my goal is to eventually have the kind of paid subscriber base that allows me to publish (and PAY) other revolting writers.

Legacy media is dying, and good riddance to it. Let’s hear it for the dangerous voices, the courageous voices, the ferocious voices and the visionary voices deemed too disruptive and threatening to the status quo of this country’s milquetoast intelligentsia. Let them fap themselves into oblivion - Write To Revolt answers to no one but the future. Resist. Record. Revolt.

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Okey dokey, let’s get into it!

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🧠 The Think Piece:

Patriarchy is the violence that dare not speak its name

“Men often react to women’s words—speaking and writing—as if they were acts of violence; sometimes men react to women’s words with violence. So we lower our voices. Women whisper. Women apologize. Women shut up. Women trivialize what we know. Women shrink. Women pull back. Most women have experienced enough dominance from men—control, violence, insult, contempt—that no threat seems empty.”

― Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse

Recent findings from a longitudinal study conducted by the Australian Institute of Family Studies have revealed the problem of men’s violence against women in Australia isn’t as bad as we thought.

It’s much, much worse.

One in three men in Australia admit to using intimate partner violence. Not “accused.” Not “alleged.” Admit.

This revelation didn’t emerge from an underground feminist lair, nor were these admissions extracted using manipulation or force (both of which we know feminists love to wield when exerting our unparalleled power across the world). No, these are the findings of a longitudinal study conducted by the government funded Australian Institute of Family Studies.

The AIFS Ten To Men Australian Longitudinal Study on Male Health began tracking 16,000 boys and men in Australia in 2013, and added another 10,000 men to the database in 2023. It’s the largest study of its kind in the world, and has yielded terrifying insults.

Some of the key findings:

• The survey found that by 2022, 35% of men had admittied to having used intimate partner violence at least once in their life.

• This figure was an increase from findings a decade earlier, in which only 24% of men admitted to having used IPV.

• The most common form of abuse cited was the use of emotional abuse (32% by 2022), followed by physical abuse (9%) and sexual abuse (2%).

• Men who experienced depression were found to be more likely to use IPV.

Perhaps the most sobering finding is this: based on the data available to us now, researchers at AIFS estimate approximately 120,000 men begin perpetrating some form of IPV every year.

The results of this study should shake the foundations of every barbecue, boardroom and parliamentary bench across the country. One in three men is pretty fucking hard to ignore. Think of the number of men you know. The number of men you work with. The number you cross paths with every day. The fathers you wave to in the school grounds. The number of men in your own family.

If one in three men admit to using intimate partner violence, then no other conclusion can be drawn but this: not only are we all guaranteed to know at least one man who’s guilty of being an abuser, but we’re likely to know several.

In fact, a full third of the men we know (and even love) are likely to also be practicing abusers or to have been abusive.

By their own admission.

And we’re here because, on some level, most people have agreed that men’s violence - which we cannot name - is the price women have to pay for being allowed to live in the world at all.

If you ever needed proof that the problem isn’t a few bad apples but the whole damn orchard, here it is — rotting from the roots, but still shipped out to market for sale as if nothing’s wrong.

We could ask how we got here, but we already know the answer. We got here through catastrophic indifference to the crisis of men’s violence against women, deliberate minimising of its impact and almost entire erasure of the source of its perpetration out of deference to patriarchy and men’s fucking feelings. We’re here because instead of doing something, anything, to address the very obvious problem of misogyny in schools, workplaces, families and social settings across the country, people have instead fixated on the idea that boys and men are suffering as a result of being unfairly characterised. While girls and women have been subjected to a spectrum of gender based violence perpetrated by boys and men - most of them known to them - the predominant response from society has been to query whether or not these same boys and men should have their “entire lives ruined” because of “one mistake”. We’re here because people refuse to believe “good blokes” can also be “bad men”, and we’re here because patriarchy has taught us to treat girls and women as shock absorbers for men’s ‘bad decisions’, and we’re here because ultimately people would rather sacrifice daughters than curtail sons.

And we’re here because, on some level, most people have agreed that men’s violence - which we cannot name - is the price women have to pay for being allowed to live in the world at all.

You women should be more grateful. Do you know what we could do to you?

History repeating itself

Concealing men’s violence has always been a heavily maintained project. The frivolous referral to couples having ‘a domestic’ was a way to signal that the sound of a woman’s screams weren’t anything to worry about. This was just what happened behind closed doors, especially when men needed to let off steam. And when it came to taking sex? Well, that was just his right.

Literally, I mean.

Until the early 1970s, every legal jurisdiction in Australia upheld the ‘conjugal rights’ of a husband. Marital rape didn’t exist - how could it, when the law itself refused to name it as such? Rape outside of marriage was technically real, but only if strict parameters were met to prove it. Did she scream? Did she fight back? Did she resist in any way? Had she been sexually active before? Did she have a ‘reputation’? Was she a Nice Girl, the kind of girl who deserved to be protected from a man’s carnal urges? Or was she a Slut, a Whore, a Tramp; the kind of girl who had said yes to every man looking to ride the town bike, and so had rescinded the right to say no to any of them?

Even if she were found to be a Nice Girl, was he a Respectable Man? Was HE from a good family? Did he have prospects that couldn’t afford to be threatened by the complaints of a girl who’d put herself in that position in the first place? One who was now trying to destroy a Good Boy’s life just to salvage her own damaged reputation? We have to be careful when it comes to letting women name things for themselves. Too much is at stake. Good men’s lives could be ruined if we take everything women say at face value. And if we let one of them get away with it, they’ll all be lining up looking to get their faces on the telly and fill their pockets with gold.

These are not the attitudes of a bygone era, but beliefs that still linger in today’s society despite them having long since been abandoned as standard practice in the legal system. Four centuries after Sir Matthew Hale codified ‘conjugal rights’ in British common law and outlined the necessary questions a court must ask when considering the allegations of silver tongued women known to be vengeful and duplicitous when it came to the punishment of men, comment threads left open on news articles about sexual violence and domestic abuse are filled with people casting doubt on the ability of women to speak honestly and without ill intent.

Women simply cannot be trusted to name a thing for what it is.